I have recently bought a WNR3500L and flashed with it Tomato. Everything is working very well, but the transfer speeds to my WD USB harddrive seems really bad. When attached to my PC, I get transfer speed somewhere around 50 MB/s when doing basic read/write measurements with dd. When doing the same on the router, I get speeds around 1-2 MB/s which seems extremely low. Has anyone else encountered this problem? Is there any solution, or is this a hardware limitation?

I got my router today and do the same thing, and i happen to have a Lacie 1Tb hdd, and getting about the same read speed with yours.

From what i gather, it seems that the FS makes some difference… I was using HFS+ which i think is incompatible with lots of routers w/ usb so i reformatted it to NTFS… (should have gone with ext3) and people are saying it's the problem…

@ Leo: You'll never get the same transfer speed on a router as you get on a full-fledged desktop/laptop - transfer speed is, in part, a function of CPU power memory/bus speed, etc. Also, your PC (running some flavor if Windows?) is prolly tuned by the software publisher to work w/ NTFS or VFAT.

I get around 7-9MB/sec (write, read) using AFP to my shared USB drive. YMMV.

OK, then this is what I did. I set up optware (the right way, I guess), and installed the netatalk package from the optware feed. I set it up according to what I said in the thread I posted… (My Experiences w/ AFP … in the general forum category). I upgraded my netatalk to 2.1.5 because it seemed about 10% faster (another user says that it has stopped the problems he was having w/ corrupted/halted backups).

I am using ext3 as the fs. Note that ext3 is not natively supported in OS X, but there are kexts out there and writeups on how to mount ext3 partitions on OS X if you ever need to. ext3 is journaled and pretty stable…robust.

granted, smb still works, but the inner geek tell me i wanna try to make afp works.

also, I read somewhere hfsplus don't work with journaled drive, is that true?
if so, there goes my hope of transferring my file from my hfsplus ext hdd to my ext3 hdd using the router only (skipping my laptop, for ~400Gb of files)